A White House Challenge: Balancing the Roles of the First Lady and First Daughter

WASHINGTON — When Melania Trump’s chief of staff announced at a staff meeting months ago that the first lady would be traveling to Africa for her first solo journey abroad, aides to Ivanka Trump, her stepdaughter, sent back a message: She was planning her own trip to Africa but just hadn’t announced it yet.

Mrs. Trump spent five days last month in Ghana, Malawi, Kenya and Egypt, a trip that generated mostly positive coverage, topped off with a glossy network special. And soon the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser will follow suit, traveling to Africa with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the president’s most loyal defenders.

Stepmother and stepdaughter have given different reasons for their interest in the continent, which Mr. Trump, who famously used an expletive to describe African countries, has yet to visit. Melania Trump used her trip to highlight poverty and her “Be Best” initiative, while Ivanka Trump’s trip, tentatively scheduled for January, will showcase her role as an informal White House liaison with members of Congress and her interest in economic empowerment.

But the competing visits also suggest the delicate balance the White House staff faces in managing the activities of both the first lady and the senior adviser to the president who has embraced the title of first daughter.

By all accounts, the two women have a complicated dynamic, and they coexist with little overlap in their roles. But they have not hosted a joint initiative carried out solely between their staffs since Mrs. Trump moved full time to the White House last year after spending the first months of her husband’s administration with her son in New York. They have rarely appeared together. And they clearly see their roles differently.

Melania Trump, 48, prefers to stay deeply private. Ivanka Trump, 37, has sought from the earliest days of the Trump administration to define her role as an adviser and policy maker, staking out a claim to an office in the West Wing, where the president and his staff are, after early reports of a Trump family office potentially being set up in the East Wing, the traditional domain of the first lady.

And while expanding her own presence in the White House, Ms. Trump has at times, intentionally or not, defined her stepmother’s role in more limited terms.

Friends say she has noticeably bristled when asked questions that she saw as traditionally in line with a first lady’s responsibilities — among friends, she has dismissed queries about whether she would be involved in White House preservation efforts, and has made it clear that she was in the White House to work on meaty policy issues, a move some allies say was out of deference to Melania Trump.

Daughter and wife both have influence with the president but they exercise it differently. Earlier this year, the first lady, who has made it a point to say she is willing to disagree with her husband, spoke publicly about her discomfort with the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents after illegal border crossings — and made several trips to the area.

Ivanka Trump also weighed in on the issue, but that only became known when Mr. Trump told a group of congressional Republicans that his daughter had been urging him to change the policy.

Historians have struggled to place the relationship between the two women in context.

Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University who studies first ladies, said there was little historical precedent for an adult first daughter and first lady to overlap to this degree. The closest parallel, she said, would be between Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt.

“Both had a great deal of influence on F.D.R.,” Ms. Jellison said.

“In the case of Melania and Ivanka Trump, on the other hand, sometimes one of them is ‘out front,’ and sometimes it’s the other one who is,” she added.

As her role has evolved, Ivanka Trump has let family friends know in the clearest terms that she is in the White House to help her father by using her charm and contacts to cut through Washington’s bureaucracy, particularly with Congress. Sometimes she has emphasized her official role on the White House staff during West Wing controversies, other times that of being the president’s daughter.

Like her father, Ms. Trump is acutely aware of her news coverage: A rotating cast of White House aides have often tried to get her credit in the news media for issues she has worked on. Her meetings are often summarized by the White House press office and emailed to reporters, a move that is not routinely extended to other senior advisers to Mr. Trump.

Image

Melania Trump, the first lady, handing out teddy bears and blankets last month for her “Be Best” initiative at a hospital in Accra, Ghana.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Ms. Trump has also campaigned with her father, turning up to speak at a rally the night before the midterm elections in Fort Wayne, Ind., and she has sometimes served as a surrogate. The first lady, for her part, has made clear she dislikes politics, and was largely absent from the campaign trail during the midterms.

Ivanka Trump’s interest in politics had led her to forge alliances with moderate Republicans, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, as well as with newly minted Trump confidants like Mr. Graham.

“If Mrs. Trump is going to focus on other things,” said Anita McBride, the former chief of staff to the first lady Laura Bush, “this is a place where Ivanka Trump can be helpful. Frankly, the president’s going to need her to do that more now than he probably ever did.”

Stephanie Grisham, Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman, did not directly address the relationship between first lady and first daughter.

“The office of the first lady is focused on her initiatives and works independently,” Ms. Grisham said in a statement, “but we often collaborate on a variety of projects with the West Wing and have a very positive working relationship.”

A White House official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity insisted that there was no tension between the two: “The first lady and Ivanka have a great relationship. As strong independent women, each has their own unique portfolio but they always support each another personally and professionally.”

And a person close to Ivanka Trump insisted she was trying to avoid stepping on her stepmother’s toes when she described certain duties as being in the East Wing’s purview.

Yet the sensitivities over Mrs. Trump’s Africa trip suggested that the aides are acutely conscious of possible problems.

The first lady’s office had asked West Wing officials to give her some space while she was in Africa so she could showcase the work she was doing, according to two people briefed on the discussion. There were widely distributed photographs of Mrs. Trump at several of the stops, including Accra, Ghana, where she was pictured cradling a small child.

But two days later, Ivanka Trump posted on her Instagram feed a video filmed by the White House team that had a final image of her with a black child during a tour of storm-struck North Carolina.

Someone in the West Wing noticed it, and flagged it for the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, who has privately described the Trump children as “playing government” and who was supposed to help manage the relationship between the two women’s offices, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

Mr. Kelly discussed the video with Ms. Trump’s staff, according to two people familiar with the talks. A White House official disputed that Mr. Kelly had such a discussion.

As for Ivanka Trump’s pending trip to Africa, White House aides said that Mr. Graham first invited her several months ago, but she had rescheduled it to accommodate the first lady’s and one taken by the secretary of state.

People familiar with the trip said that Bill Shine, the White House communications director, has been helping shape coverage of the visit.

Like the first lady’s, it may also include a network special.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Test for White House: Balancing Roles of First Lady and First Daughter. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe